SYP Mentorship: Meeting 2

What happens when I travel into the City to meet Juliet at her office at Mushens Entertainment?

The giant poster of Anya Taylor-Joy dressed as a seventeenth-century woman greeted me.

Funny. I’d just started reading The Miniaturist, and it seems I’ve just walked into the office of the literary agent who made that all possible.

I have been given an amazing opportunity. But Juliet’s a busy woman so we sat down and jumped into it. We had three topics to cover:

• developmental editing
• the time audit
• my spreadsheet

I hadn’t updated my spreadsheet so that knocked that off the list.

Developmental editing
Instead we did a deep-dive into developmental editing. We swapped reports: mine was forty pages while hers was around ten.

Hers was much easier to read. Mine is overstuffed with information.

By trying to help authors, I’m overwhelming them. Well, that’s not helpful. Juliet advised that I provide them the same information, but in a place they can access it if and when they want to look at it.

We decided that I’d remove all the explanations, create blog posts with links to this information, and scale down the report to a maximum of fifteen pages and we moved on.

Time audit
There were audible gasps in the room when I discussed what I was seeing with my time audit.

It’s not that my time wasn’t being well-managed; my time wasn’t being managed at all, and I was making myself a slave to my desk and the computer gods.

Here are my excuses for my time-management issues:

1. Freelance = I make myself work overtime, all week and weekends.
2. What to prioritize? The client work comes first, but the admin must be done in parallel. Otherwise I’ll face a Christmas break where I spend the entire time getting the spreadsheet in order. (True story, see Christmas 2021).
3. New country + covid. I moved to London in August 2019. I’m lucky I like getting out and talking to people, because in that six months, I met scores of new friends and colleagues. But it’s December 2021, and we’re all still stuck. Without the draw of an evening at the theatre, or dinner in Soho, or a night out with the girls, the easiest thing to say is, ‘Of course I’ll sign up for another online conference!’

Now that I’m finished with excuses, it’s time to move forward with what I’m going to do about them.

1. Get organized. Juliet’s notebook method didn’t work for me, but I’ve got my own structure now and I’m amazed at the difference. My to-do list is getting done!
2. Don’t get overwhelmed. Keep doing the time audit because it’s keeping me on track, allowing me to see when I’ve been working at something for too long.
3. Rethink how run my business because it’s also my life.

 
I really enjoyed going into the office and meeting Juliet and her team. As I was putting on my coat, Juliet asked what I liked to read. “Historical fiction!” She then handed me a cute ME tote bag full of books. Christmas came early this year!